"Let’s Get This Class War Started"

nesf

Malibu Stacy wrote: »

People practiced Santería in Cuba long before Castro came to power. The RCC hierarchy supported Batista, and because the church was more hierarchical and organized, anti-Castro church officials (including parish priests who initially supported the revolution) presented a greater threat to the regime than the santeros. But many people who identify as Catholics also observe and recognize Santeria rituals and gods - it is uniquely Cuban, so unlike Catholicism, it couldn't be painted as the religion of the conquistadores and the wealthy.

Also, when it comes to human nature, one can make the same criticism of market fundamentalists. The belief that 'the market' is self-correcting, and should therefore be the mechanism through which all transactions occur does not take into account human greed and short-sightedness. Both market fundamentalists and hardline Marxists fail to take human foibles into full account, and are left to shout "We need more!" (i.e. MORE market or Marxist fundamentalism) when their attempts to impose their orthodoxy on imperfect human societies fails.

Well, just as there are no truly Marxist economies for Marxists to point at there are no free market utopias for free market fundamentalists to point at either.

It's not really about human nature, just that neither extreme is particularly relevant when talking about any modern economy, they hug the centre far too much for that.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

Jonny7

nesf wrote: »

Eh, Cuba? It's not exactly self-sufficient.

Exactly, I'm not sure how it's supporters continue when so many real world applications have failed.

I can only surmise it stems from a purely ideological idealistic stand-point - which, to me anyway, was Marx's fatal flaw, that and his lack of understanding of basic human nature.

The Corinthian

Jonny7 wrote: »

Exactly, I'm not sure how it's supporters continue when so many real world applications have failed.

I can only surmise it stems from a purely ideological idealistic stand-point - which, to me anyway, was Marx's fatal flaw, that and his lack of understanding of basic human nature.

That's a large part of it all right. Lack of incentive, propensity for power to corrupt, and so on are not really recognised, despite the article linked to above, which if you make the effort to decipher is a classic example of academic obfuscation, with claims backed up by quotes that don't actually support the claims they're supposed to (if you actually can follow them, because the piece is intentionally written to make this difficult), unless you decide to interpret them in some convoluted way.

There is also a tendency for Marxism to favour the tabula rasa approach to human nature (still popular in left-wing circles), which claims that human nature can be shaped as we wish. This was a popular theory in the nineteenth century and the debate between it and the 'inherited' view that our nature is fixed continued well into the twentieth century, at which point we eventually came to the conclusion that the truth was probably somewhere in-between the two extremes.

But Marx wouldn't have been aware of this, he died decades before such a compromise conclusion was reached, and would have instead favoured one of the prevailing theories of his time. It's a bit like building an entire school of science on the presumption that light is a particle, rather than a wave - two other opposing theories of the nineteenth century that ended up in a simelar compromise in the twentieth.

I wouldn't blame Marx for any of this. How was he to know that the rise of the trade union movement, or the welfare state would end up disproving many of his predictions? That wage exploitation of the worker wasn't going to happen so easily, because it turned out that wage elasticity wasn't quite as elastic as he thought it was.

The problem was not so much with him, but with those who followed him; economic science became subordinate to political ideology. Change to the former could and was blocked on the basis that it didn't fit in with the latter.

Instead, liberal market economics, for all it's flaws and limitations, had one advantage - it didn't really care about ideology. That's why it is vastly different to what it was in Marx's day; happily borrowing from socialism when it made sense - something that communist economies only started to do (in reverse) very late in the day, because it took them a while to get over this ideological block against heretical pragmatism.